I Talk Too Much

by Francis Rossi

  It was also around this time that Rick met the girl he would eventually marry. It was while we were on the road in Germany again. Her name was Marietta and she was a teenager who had just started at college. Marietta was very much Rick’s type in every way except one: she wasn’t blonde. No problem, he just got her to dye her hair blonde. This was something Rick would do with all the women he married. He did it later with his second wife, Patty, and then again with his third wife Lyndsay. He simply loved the idea of walking into a place with a beautiful blonde on his arm, so that it would be two blondes walking into a place together. A bit like his idea that he and I should turn up in the same sorts of cars, he had it all figured out. Anyway, Rick and Marietta had a whirlwind romance. One night she was a girl in a club in Hanover. The next she was on her way over to England to meet Rick’s parents. Although Marietta was younger than Rick she was very sophisticated by comparison – her family was very well off. She used to smoke a cigarette through a long holder like Marlene Dietrich. When Rick asked her to marry him her father was outraged. According to Rick, he actually offered to pay him to stop seeing her. Rick’s reaction was classic – and typically impulsive: he whisked her off to the local register office in Woking and married her there. Then took her back to his parents’ council house on the Shearwater Estate, where they lived in one of the rooms.

  While this is all going on, the band is still gigging endlessly. It was easier for me and Jean because she had the family around her and she wasn’t a kid living in a foreign country. Rick would be away for days at a time with us, leaving Marietta alone at his parents’ place. They loved her and treated her well but it wasn’t easy for a young girl to be alone in a strange country with no husband and no friends around. It didn’t help either that when she told her father what she’d done he hit the roof.

  In the end, though, he calmed down enough to invite her and Rick back to Germany, where the family put on a proper German wedding for them. Then they came back to Woking, moved in together and did their best to work things out from there. I know she wanted to go to university but somehow that didn’t happen. Then she went to be a teacher, teaching German at this school in Horsham. But that didn’t work out. Rick said it was because of the mini-skirts she wore to the school each day. She wasn’t much older than the boys she was supposed to be teaching and so she left there. It was very chaotic and typical Rick. Act first; think later. But they did seem happy together. Certainly, I’d never seen Rick so happy and settled. Blonde wife, maroon Bentley, nice guitar – he was made up.

  Roy Lynes, on the other hand, was not having a good time of it. We were on our way to a gig in Aberdeen when he jumped ship somewhere around Stoke-on-Trent. He’d met a girl and fallen in love, and that was it for Roy. I can’t say I blame him, though we were a bit put out at the time having to continue the tour without him. Roy was in his mid-twenties, he’d given this pop star lark a damn good go and now he was tired of travelling up and down the country. Then he met the love of his life and he made up his mind. It was obviously the right decision for him too. Many years later, during a tour of Australia, where Roy was now living, he came to one of our shows – and brought the girl with him, who he’d been married to ever since. He seemed really happy, too.

  I look back on those days in the early seventies now and see it as a wonderful time for us all. Yes, we had fears and insecurities. But there was a great innocence to everything we were doing. We knew it could all end tomorrow. It already had ‘ended tomorrow’ for us a few times. But somehow we had managed to keep going. Now, with Colin in our management corner, a new direction to our music that felt good and proper for the first time and a look – if you could call it that – that required zero maintenance, there really wasn’t too much to worry about. Or if there was, I had become very good at ignoring it and just keeping my head down concentrating on the guitar. (Though not that much, obviously, or I would have been a hell of a lot better.)

  One of the reasons for this newfound calm, I now realise, was the fact that I had become much more of a dope smoker by this point. Ever since Stevie Marriott first turned us on to the pleasures of being blissed out on good Lebanese Red, or Moroccan, or Afghani Black, or the number of other brands of cannabis resin that were on offer in those days (this was long before the current hyper-strength strands of homegrown hydroponics that are available now in the UK), I had begun to much prefer smoking a joint to having a drink. For one thing, it offered a whole new perspective on things. Music sounded better. Jokes sounded funnier. Bad news didn’t travel so fast. Even sex was better, or certainly more fun.

  The other thing I found smoking dope was useful for was writing songs. In terms of inspiration, it really seemed to work. Of course, if you weren’t careful you would come up with quite a lot of nonsense as well. But in the main it seemed to unlock the creative juices and I began writing a lot of the songs that became the foundation of the Status Quo catalogue. A good example of that would be ‘Mean Girl’. If you listen to ‘Mean Girl’ you can hear the building blocks of all the hits we would have over the next decade, especially in ‘Down Down’, with its revved-up boogie beat that stops and starts. (According to my co-writer here, Mick Wall, that is. Personally, I’m not sure.)

  Bob and I wrote that one. I still get asked why Bob and I wrote so many songs together, as opposed to Rick and me, or Rick, Alan and me. The answer is obvious really: I came up with better songs with Bob. Rick and I did try to write more songs together, and carried on trying right up until the end. But we never really came up with much that stood out. The problem was that as soon as Rick would come up with something that sounded good, I’d ask him to stop and go back so we could work on it, build it into something. But Rick was always convinced he could do better – always. I’d be going, ‘No, Rick, stop! Go back. That was great, that little riff or melody.’ He’d be like, ‘No, I can do that much better, come back to it later.’ Then he’d either forget what he’d done or go back and ruin it by trying too hard to make it better and better. Rick was like that in all areas of his life. He’d buy a car – the best car in the world, according to him. Then get rid of it two weeks later. Naw, never really liked it. Same with women in a lot of cases. He always thought he could do better.

  Writing a song with someone else is very much about chemistry. Rick and I had a lot of personal chemistry in the early days. We were best mates. But in order to write a song you need more than that. The relationship needs a driver and a carrier, and maybe we were too similar. In the best songs each of us wrote, Rick and I were always the drivers. We both still needed someone else there to bounce off. But for me that always worked best with people other than Rick. And for Rick it was the same. In fact, he also began writing more with Bob. Anyway, it was all about who had the best song, not who wrote it.

  There was also less tension when I wrote with Bob, because he wasn’t in the band. There was no agenda. Bob was just Bob – even after we started having really big hits, he never changed one bit. He wasn’t interested in the spotlight, didn’t care about recognition. Just got on with his job, which was all about maintaining good relationships. The band could be bastards sometimes – all bands can when they are frazzled from weeks of one-nighters – and Bob would be our shield. We called him Bob Young: Friend of the People. He’s still like that today, bless him.

  Another song I wrote with Bob around this time would also become one of our most famous hits, though it would be another three years before it evolved into the rocking version we finally released. This was ‘Caroline’. We were idling away an afternoon on holiday with our wives and children at this hotel in Perranporth, Cornwall, in the summer of 1970. I’ve always loved country music and ‘Caroline’ began life as a sort of country tune, slow blues with a bit of a lilt to it. We liked it so much we made a demo of it. It was only much later when we were scrabbling around for material that it became transformed with its police-siren riff and jet-propelled rhythm.

  Instead, our next single in 1971 was a song Bob and
I had written, again very much in the shuffle boogie mode we were now pushing ahead with, called ‘Tune to the Music’. We were convinced we were onto a winner – only to see it completely flop. Again! Argh! It came out in March 1971 and the radio utterly ignored it. It probably didn’t help that we were having a rare few weeks off the road at the time, trying to make another album. We did a show at the Marquee club in London with Thin Lizzy supporting us and it was one of the best gigs we’d done. Lizzy were amazing. We were no slouches. And the crowd loved it. Packed the place out. Played the new single. Then went home to write some more songs and wonder why having a hit was so bloody hard.

  The album we released later that year, Dog of Two Head (that’s right, no ‘s’ on the end), is these days regarded by hardcore Quo fans as one of our early classics. I always wonder if it was so bloody good why it was such a commercial flop. Yes, it managed to get a foothold in the top 30, but only for a couple of weeks before disappearing down the ladder again. It’s true it contained some of the best new songs Bob and I had written like ‘Mean Girl’ and ‘Gerdundula’ (the latter a wonderfully catchy little ditty, written by us under the pseudonyms Manston and James, and named after some pals of ours we’d met on the road in Germany named Gerd and Ula – geddit?). They would later become chart hits for us after we had become properly famous and the record company decided to cash in on some of our old material. Some people blamed the title of the album, saying it didn’t make sense. But we named it after a saying our roadie Paul Lodge – Slug, we called him – used all the time. We thought it was funny, ha, yeah. Maybe not so funny as an album title, though.

  When the album wasn’t the big success we had hoped, our relationship with Pye really suffered. I honestly can’t remember if we were dropped by the label – probably – or whether Colin Johnson stepped in and called a halt to proceedings. But we began 1972 with no record label. It was a case of In Colin We Trust. Stay out on the road and leave him to work on the small print. That was my attitude anyway. The irony was that even though we didn’t have a record deal our fan-base was growing. Colin made sure of that by keeping us working continually on the road. Still, he had an uphill task trying to get us signed to one of the other big London-based labels. To some of them we were damaged goods – four albums already out, none of them more than modest hits. A handful of successful singles spread over a four-year period. Once again, there was talk round the campfire of maybe splitting the band up and starting again with a new line-up – and yet another new name.

  This was not an idea I was prepared to consider for longer than the time it took me to roll another joint. I had recently become a father again, to another beautiful baby boy, who we named Nicholas. For me there was no choice but to soldier on with the band. Luckily, the crowds were coming to the shows and Colin was able to use that to attract the newer, longer-haired generation of record company executives down to see us.

  It was a strategy that paid off in spades when he persuaded a relatively new label called Vertigo to sign the band. They were part of the Philips/Phonogram Record Company, which was huge and very commercially mainstream based. Vertigo was designed to cash in on the new young ‘progressive’ rock artists that had come along. ‘Progressive rock’ didn’t mean then exactly what it means now. Long musical epics full of widdlywiddly keyboards were not a prerequisite. It was just a term really to differentiate singles acts from album-oriented bands. So they had signed new bands like Black Sabbath, Gentle Giant, Nazareth and Uriah Heep, gambling that with a bit of nurturing these sorts of acts would deliver handsome sales in the long term through the success of their albums.

  Colin had somehow managed to make them see Status Quo as being in that mould. Told them to forget about the poncey flower-power hits of the sixties and see us for what we were now – denim-clad, long-haired (back when long hair still meant something), above all, serious. And that serious album-buying rock fans saw us that way too. The clincher was when we appeared halfway down the bill on the Sunday night of that year’s Reading Festival. Everyone in the business who mattered was there ligging backstage.

  There were about twelve bands on, including us, on the Sunday and it would have been easy to get lost in the pack. But John Peel, the ultra-hip Radio 1 DJ, who was DJing at the festival that year, had decided to champion us. It’s well known now that Peel loved to champion the underdogs and that’s what we very much were at the time. He introduced us onto the Reading stage that year, calling us something like ‘one of the finest rock ’n’ roll bands in the world’. That’s what it sounded like to me anyway. Whatever he said it got the most enormous cheer and we ran on feeling ready to take on the world. It became one of the best shows we did all year – and at the end of it Vertigo couldn’t wait to sign us.

  There was some fiddly nonsense with Pye, whereby they got a cut from our first few records with Vertigo – which was charming considering the tiny royalty we had been on with them but if that was the cost of our being given a second chance at a new label we didn’t care. Within a couple of weeks we were in IBC Studios in Portland Place in London making what would be the album that changed all our lives forever – Piledriver.

  From the moment we started work on it, everything about Piledriver was perfect. Even the name, which Colin Johnson came up with – a piledriver being a wrestling term, not the over-the-top American-style WWE wrestling you get now, but the original two-falls, one-submission variety you got on British television on a Saturday afternoon back in the sixties and seventies, when guys like Mick McManus and Jackie Pallo were the big stars. A piledriver is when one wrestler grabs his opponent, turns him upside-down and drops to his knees, driving the opponent headfirst into the mat of the wrestling ring. It was a term – and an image – that perfectly suited the music Status Quo now stood for. Hard, direct, undeniable – and actually quite humorous, if you shared that sort of bloke-ish knockabout humour. How that explains the picture of a gorilla holding a rocket on the back of the album sleeve I don’t know, though. Perhaps the album art people weren’t wrestling fans, who knows?

  The other thing that was great was that for the first time in our careers we got what can only be described as ‘artistic freedom’. The freedom to make exactly the kind of music we wanted to without having to worry about what other people thought or whether we had a chance of getting on the radio. We didn’t even have a proper producer for the album. It was just the four of us setting up our gear as we would at a gig, then playing the songs pretty much exactly as we would live – very, very loud. The only luxury was that if we weren’t happy with a take we could do another. And another. And another, if we wanted, though we were on such a hot streak we hardly did more than two or three takes of anything.

  We were also fortunate that the A & R (artists and repertoire) guy who had signed us to Vertigo, Brian Shepherd, was a real music-first person. He’d been a roadie for Magna Carta, a progressive folk-rock group who were also signed to Vertigo, and really believed in the ‘vision thing’. What we didn’t find out until later was that Brian had been keeping an eye on us for several months. Brian, who would later become managing director of Phonogram, was a hugely experienced record man who had first joined Philips Records in 1963 before going into producing. He had returned to take over the running of the Vertigo label just before we were signed. Brian was to become a hugely influential figure in our career. Come what may, Brian was always there to lend an ear and offer wise counsel. He became our champion at the label.

  It was Brian that encouraged us to do our own thing, that we didn’t need anyone else to show us how to be true to ourselves musically. I wasn’t sure yet if that was strictly true but Brian proved himself a true friend of the Quo time and again over the next ten years.

  Things like ‘sound levels’ didn’t even enter our heads. We just went at it like kids in a sweetshop. The end result was an album that more than lived up to its name. We had really started to come into our own as songwriters, too. Bob and I wrote three of the eight songs – the openin
g track, ‘Don’t Waste My Time’, which became a major highlight of the live show forevermore; ‘Paper Plane’, the track that was chosen as the single; and a now-for-something-completely-different ballad, ‘Unspoken Words’, which was a beautiful slow blues where I got to be Eric Clapton for five minutes and Rick, who sang the lead vocals, got to be George Harrison.

  Rick and I wrote two songs together: ‘Oh Baby’, which was a right little raver, almost rockabilly, which we sang in unison Everlys style, and ‘Big Fat Mama’, which Rick sang and which was destined to become another really big song for Quo fans. Alan also had a hand in two songs: a lovely ballad called ‘A Year’, which I sang and Alan co-wrote with Bernie Frost, a lovely man who will come back into our story later; and a co-write with Rick, which Rick sang, called ‘All the Reasons’. I love it that Alan, the hard man of the band, co-wrote two of the loveliest songs we ever recorded. Then to finish off the album Alan sang lead on our (very) long version of ‘Roadhouse Blues’, the toasty blues shuffle by the Doors, which helped cement our decision to go in a similar direction.